Run Your Own Social Network Using elgg on RHEL / CentOS and Scientific Linux

by SK

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Elgg is an open-source and powerful social networking engine used to create your own social networking web site. In this How To, I am gonna show you how to build your own social network website, just like Facebook and Linkedin.

Prerequisites

Elgg needs Apache, MySQL and PHP modules in order to build a social networking websites. So let us install the following necessary prerequisites first:

Open the Apache main configuration file and change from AllowOverride None to AllowOverride All:

[root@server ~]# vi /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf
# AllowOverride controls what directives may be placed in .htaccess files.
# It can be "All", "None", or any combination of the keywords:
# Options FileInfo AuthConfig Limit
#
AllowOverride All

[root@server ~]# vi /etc/sysconfig/selinux
# This file controls the state of SELinux on the system.
# SELINUX= can take one of these three values:
# enforcing - SELinux security policy is enforced.
# permissive - SELinux prints warnings instead of enforcing.
# disabled - No SELinux policy is loaded.
SELINUX=disabled
# SELINUXTYPE= can take one of these two values:
# targeted - Targeted processes are protected,
# mls - Multi Level Security protection.
SELINUXTYPE=targeted

Starting elgg installation

Open the web browser and navigate to http://ip-address/elgg/install.php or http://domain-name/elgg/install.php. Follow the on screen instructions:

You may get an error like in the below screen-shot.

To get rid of this error, open the file .htaccess in the elgg directory and edit as follows. If .htaccess file doesn’t exist, create it by copying the htaccess_dist file in the elgg directory to .htaccess.

Senthilkumar, aka SK, is a Linux enthusiast, FOSS Supporter & Linux Consultant from Tamilnadu, India. A passionate and dynamic person, aims to deliver quality content to IT professionals. He loves very much to write and explore new things about Linux, Open Source, Computers and Internet.

Thanks for the walkthrough, it worked great the first try… now I’m off to read the manual so I can be ready when I start adding staff to it. :)

SK

Never heard about Friendica. Let me try and I’ll make an article accordingly.

Brig C. McCoy

Oops, forgot to say I had to install php-mbstring to make it happy. Once I did that, all bueno. :)

SK

Thanks for the tip Brig. Post has been updated. Glad it helped you.

Etescartz

Hi! I stumbled on this article and I really want to try elgg on a ubuntu server, but I’m at a standstill . I’m a newbie when it comes to linux and I tried installing the packages mentioned in the article, but the must be different in the Ubuntu repositories.. Any help would be greatly appreciated.